Welcome to the Foodie Saturdays segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Foodie Saturdays will feature food related content. We here at Geek Alabama will make foodies out there very happy when we feature a video or post all about food, eating food, or making food.

Smucker’s spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars losing money on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And then everything changed.

When Smucker’s acquired a small Fargo startup for $1 million in 1998, it got a patent for a sealed crustless sandwich — and a manufacturing problem it didn’t fully understand yet. For the next decade, the company poured money into new factories, flagged “capacity constraints” in annual report after annual report, and watched Uncrustables lose money the entire time. The culprit was the bread itself: too many air pockets, too much freeze-thaw damage, too inconsistent to seal reliably at scale. It took a CEO confession at a 2023 Bank of America conference to finally explain what Smucker’s had quietly engineered — a proprietary formula found nowhere else. Once that worked, everything followed: school contracts, NFL locker rooms, 4.5 million sandwiches a day, and $1 billion in annual sales. Oh, and a few lawsuits against anyone who tried to copy it.

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